Calcutta is than cultural and commercial capital of West Bengal, Eastern India. It is located in Eastern  India and together with its suburbs it has over 15 million inhabitants, and it is the third biggest urban area in the world. If you look in the Calcutta phone directories though, you will find very few telephone numbers compared to the number of people because many of them live in great poverty. Calcutta is very famous for its IT specialists that work from here for a lot of multinational companies, because they are very smart but have very small wage expectations (if you were to hire such a smart specialist anywhere else in the world you would have to pay much more, even ten to twenty times the money an Indian IT specialist is currently paid.



So it is very convenient for the multinational companies to open an office here and hire some local genius that they would pay very little, but who will be very satisfied earning a lot more than others that work for Indian employees).

The city’s birth took place at the end of the 16^th century, when the English east Indian company came here searching for a place to start consolidating the trade business with Bengal. At that time, in the place where the town was going to be built were three little villages, and the English started building near them, on the banks of the river Hooghly, a fort, named Fort William. The three villages and the fort are now included in the city of Calcutta.



Business went well so the marshes surrounding the city were drained, and the city grew bigger and bigger, as a normal outcome of the flourishing commercial activities and was soon declared the capital of India. They started the opium trade, which was produced here and then shipped to Europe by a British company that still exists nowadays and now trade tea (in fact, it is the biggest company in the world that auctions tea). By the beginning of the 19^th century the British population in Calcutta has increased very much, and the town was divided into two area, one inhabited by the British and other European traders, called the White Town, and one inhabited by the Indian natives, called the Black Town. If you look now in the Calcutta phone directories you fill find a lot of names with English provenience.



Calcutta is a city of contrasts: it has a large population and most of them did not have access to education, so it has a large unskilled and semi-skilled worker community, but it also has a lot of people who got a fine education and that work now in the country or outside of it for important companies all over the world.